Yes, it appears that pigs can take at least short domestic flights, and Hell is facing some moderate climate change.
At least that was my thought this week when the top-ranked, highly competitive film schools at USC and UCLA collaborated on a conference on “transmedia,” the buzzwordy concept of creating related content for ardent fans across multiple media platforms to flesh out a particular story world or narrative universe (think Star Wars or Batman).
The conference mixed academics from two continents with the creative minds behind transmedia projects tied to “The Blair Witch Project,” “Harry Potter,” “Minority Report,” “The Dark Knight” and “2012” movies, the “Lost” TV series, the “Medal of Honor” videogames, Nine Inch Nail’s most recent album and more.
“We're in the middle of a Cambrian explosion” of diversity, said Richard Lamarchand, lead designer for Naughty Dog Software’s “Uncharted 2: Drake’s Revenge,” the 2009 game of the year for many critics. “There are all kinds of controllers, mobile devices. There are so many experience opportunities.”
Fans are eating up all the cryptic, dystopian alternate-reality game experiences and spinoff comic books and book-length novelizations, participants said. But just as importantly, what once were just marketing-driven afterthoughts now often are aesthetic achievements that stand on their own. The only questions, and they’re big ones, are deciding what counts as a success, based on what criteria, and judged by whom.
“This can be where the art lives,” said Steve Peters, a partner in No Mimes Media, which created an elaborate alternate-reality game called “The Threshold” for tech superpower Cisco Systems.
For these cross-media creators, building a riveting story universe that can attract fans on more than one medium also means picking the right platform for a given story, and story world. Some worlds are complex and interesting enough to contain a lot of stories, on a lot of platforms.
“Transmedia is about storytelling today for all the media we live on,” said Diane Nelson, CEO of DC Entertainment, the venerable comic-book unit cum idea bank for many kinds of Warner Bros. projects. “We may want to create a web property or game before swinging for the fences with a feature film.”
“Sometimes you find an idea and say, ‘That's a great game but it's never going to be anything but a great game.’ And that's okay,” said Nils Peyron, EVP and managing partner for Blind Winks Productions.
Transmedia’s roots are in marketing, typically for movies, as with the leftover bits of film and surrounding “mythology” that panelist John Hegeman and the creators of “The Blair Witch Project” deployed so successfully 10 years ago to drive that indie film’s huge success. But given transmedia’s marketing-driven roots, not everyone agrees on what counts as a win.
One audience member tartly observed that, “Anything that is concerned with ROI (return on investment) isn’t art.” Yes, he clearly hadn’t talked to a studio executive in a long time (despite saying he was in the middle of post-production on a science-fiction film).
